Robert Jenrick: There’s no justice in the Government’s verdict on trial by jury and we need their case thrown out

Robert Jenrick is MP for Newark and Shadow Justice Secretary.

For centuries and centuries, Britain’s success has been built on a combination of progress and tradition.

The older the rule or system, the more cautious we should be about dismantling it. Long-standing conventions, which still offer immense value today, should not be cast aside casually.

You don’t need to be an expert in our constitutional settlement to know that jury trials are one such convention.

The earliest reference to trial by jury in England dates back to 997 – a thousand years before Tony Blair came to power. They were mentioned in the law codes of Alfred the Great, in Magna Carta, and for centuries afterwards. Time and time again, the jury trial has served as a check on an overbearing state; an outlet for popular moral sentiment in a judicial system which can often seem divorced from the experience of ordinary people.

The right to be tried by our peers is not a mere administrative detail to be discarded when the spreadsheets turn red. It is the “lamp that shows that freedom lives,” as Lord Devlin famously described it. Juries have acted as the golden thread running through centuries of change and upheaval – one of Britain’s greatest gifts to the world. Yet David Lammy, a man who declares   himself a champion of civil rights, is preparing to sever it.

Make no mistake: Labour’s proposals to scrap jury trials for the vast majority of cases is an assault on our ancient liberties. If Lammy’s proposals pass, an estimated 95 per cent of trials will be decided by a single Judge. It is the politics of the technocrat, driven by a lawyers-know-best arrogance that views the public as an inconvenience rather than a partner in the administration of justice.

Even Baroness Kennedy, a grandee of the Left, has warned against this plan, saying: “It’s been a Labour trope — don’t trust the ordinary citizen. It is a shocking display of thinking ordinary people are not up to it.”

She understands what Lammy has chosen to forget: that the jury acts as a safety valve within the justice system. Juries pool the collective wisdom of 12 citizens and inject common sense into the courtroom. They ensure that the law does not stray too far from the values of the people it serves. To lose that connection is to sleepwalk into a system where ordinary people are judged by a distant, unfeeling establishment.

The hypocrisy from David Lammy is breathtaking. In 2020, Lammy was unequivocal. “Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea,” he lectured, warning that they are “foundational to the justice system in England and Wales” and “fundamental to our democracy”. In his own 2017 review, he praised the jury system as a “success story,” rightly recognising that juries expose and deter prejudice in a way that lone judges cannot.

So what has changed? Has the principle of justice shifted? No. Have the British people turned against this ancient liberty? No, these proposals were nowhere to be found in Labour’s election manifesto. Lammy has abandoned his principles for the convenience of office.

Labour’s excuse for this vandalism is the backlog in our Crown Courts. Nobody denies the crisis. But as the Criminal Bar Association have pointed out, juries are not the cause of this crisis. The backlog is the result of an administrative failure to manage the system we have – failure that has only worsened under Labour, with the backlog rising by 10 per cent in their first year.

It is a failure of competence, not of the constitution.

There is no conclusive evidence that scrapping juries will even solve the delay. It is a distraction, attacking the symptom while leaving the disease untouched.

This year, 21,000 sitting days have been wasted because courtrooms sat empty. If the Lord Chancellor simply did the hard yards of governing – and these court rooms were filled – we could have reduce the backlog by between 5,000 to 10,000 cases this year alone.

But that would require hard work. It would require prioritising the British justice system over the pet projects of the Left. Instead, we see a government that can find billions to house illegal migrants in hotels and fund a bloated welfare state, yet pleads poverty when it comes to the fundamental machinery of British justice. They would rather strip you of your rights than strip the state of its waste.

It is the latest example of Labour conflating the rule of law with rule by lawyers. We see it in their surrender of the Chagos Islands, their refusal to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and now, in their reheated plot to dismantle one of our most ancient liberties.

We will resist this assault on our liberties, just as we have in the past when Labour tried to curb jury trials under Tony Blair. Even at the height of Covid, despite enormous pressure, the last Conservative Government resisted calls to suspend jury trials, recognising their importance.

Since his plans leaked on Tuesday, David Lammy has gone missing. In the Urgent Question I secured on Thursday, he refused to show. He’s trying to steal our freedoms and hiding as he does it. We will fight tooth and nail to ensure he fails.

What’s clearer now more than ever is that under Labour, our time-honoured liberties are not safe. We must not let the ‘lawyers-know-best’ brigade dismantle the protections that keep us free. David Lammy should heed his own advice from 2020: pull your finger out, get all the courts open, and leave our juries alone.